With the deluge of Hurricane Harvey approaching my house in persistent waves, rising through our bushes and up our brick walls, there was nothing else to do. My wife, Paola, laughed at me, knowing all too well that rolling towels against windows as the water breached our refuge was like grabbing Band-Aids to care for a gushing bullet wound. Within an hour, there was a foot of contaminated water across the first floor of our house, making it smell like a swamp.

Now, two weeks later, we are safe, eating well and enjoying the company of close friends who have taken us in. The two of us and our 12-year-old daughter, Emilie, are among the lucky ones, as many continue searching for a decent meal and a place to sleep in peace. Our house is drying, the walls peeled back to their wooden skeleton and the hardwood floors ripped up and strewed across our dying lawn. We are about to move into a short-term apartment. Recovery is in sight, even if I need a pair of binoculars to see it.

The damage to our home is considerable, and will be expensive to fix. New windows, appliances, curtains — it will all add up. Multiply our losses thousands of times, and you can begin to understand the blow to the Houston area, the country’s fourth-largest metropolis. Lost home values, lost tax receipts, damaged schools, countless stores shut for repairs, half-empty restaurants, looting. And now Floridians have taken flight in the face of another monster storm, wondering if a similar fate awaits them.

Houston has declared that it is open for business, but road travel can last hours longer than usual, complicated by closed roads and displaced commuters. Some refineries remain shut or are running at reduced capacity, and gasoline prices have soared. On the other side of the ledger, the money I am going to spend, multiplied by thousands, will be a stimulus package for the regional and national economy.

Of course, my story is a grain of sand compared with the constellation of wrecked neighborhoods, broken hearts and even deaths. But perhaps my family’s relative comfort has given me time to think about what this all means, beyond the economics. I hope that I come out of this experience stronger as an individual, and that together we come out stronger as a family. I am fairly confident that will happen, although I could be naïve.

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The house after floodwaters receded and workers began ripping out walls.CreditJake Price for The New York Times

Apart from financial losses, the storm has brought something else: It has exposed the skeletons of our lives, just as surely as the wooden bones of our stripped walls. It has exposed us to the limitations of our patience, not to mention our insurance, along with our dependency on a contractor and his workers, and the challenging task of juggling our jobs and family needs.

It is probably hardest on Emilie, who awaits the opening of school on Monday after a two-week delay. With no room of her own, and mostly separated from her friends, she is bored and moody. Paola, ordinarily sociable, is turning down dinner invitations. The two of them share a bed with our cockapoo, Sweetie, while I sleep on the living-room couch, waking up frantic each day about the tasks that await.

Decisions come fast and furiously; they have since the first days. As the waters devoured our house’s first floor, Paola and I had to choose what to save and what to discard. We rolled up our Persian rug and took it upstairs, along with books, CDs and two light tables. Our couches were too heavy to save, but I managed to haul a leather chair onto a couch and saved it from the waters. Paola insisted we should pull up the curtains or take them down. I said let them go. That was a mistake.

Once the floodwaters receded, which happened with amazing speed, we went into action to find someone to rip out the walls and floors. It was almost like a race among our neighbors to get the stuff out, to avoid mold, even while we all commiserated, compared notes, shared stories and drinks. I asked a trusted local real estate agent to recommend a contractor, whom we hired on the spot, since there seemed no time to lose. Was he the best? Maybe. I had to go with my gut.

Then came calls to the insurance companies. The auto insurer provided a quick, fair payment for my wife’s car (mine was a company car), but our homeowner’s policy doesn’t take care of flood damage to the house. Fortunately we have flood insurance, but it doesn’t cover lodging while the house is repaired, however long that might be. One neighbor said he expected to be out eight months.

That leaves FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I registered for assistance, and was quickly offered several weeks in a hotel room — but told that the room would probably be on the outskirts of Houston or beyond, so my daughter and my wife would probably have to spend hours getting to school and work. We decided to seek temporary housing on our own and see if FEMA would defray some of the costs.

I spend part of each day at our waterlogged house, where I have been able to resume working from an upstairs office as well as organize the rebuilding effort. I worried about the adjusters’ visit, having heard that adjusters can be stingy. Scavengers are picking through everything, with trucks to haul it away.

But when the adjusters — a married couple from Mobile, Ala. — arrived to inspect our house and belongings, they could not help being impressed by the piles of debris on nearly every lawn on our block. They seemed sympathetic, but we will need to see their paperwork before we know what we can spend on repairs.

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Debris outside the reporter’s house, in Bellaire, Tex.CreditJake Price for The New York Times

The bad news was what they said would not be covered — our garage, for instance, because, the adjusters said, it includes a home office above. (They later changed their minds.) The gate to our driveway may or may not be covered because it is only partly attached to the house.

I am not particularly religious, but on the first Friday night after the flooding I went to my synagogue to find some solace. Congregants embraced, and I went over to hug a woman I know casually because she was crying. I asked if she had lost her house; no, her mother had just died days before. It dawned on me that hers was a real loss, compared with the material things.

Rabbi David Lyon, in his own eloquent way, beseeched those in need to reach out for help and for everyone to assist one another. “Hate is not the opposite of love,” he said, citing the Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel. “Indifference is the opposite of love.”

I also went to church, two days later. I was not hedging my bets with God; I was covering the fire at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Tex., and I have found that a church is a good place to meet local residents and get information. The music was uplifting, and I could see people’s anxieties melt with prayer. I smiled when the wife of a firefighter pleaded with the congregation, “Don’t listen to the media; listen to Jesus.” I couldn’t understand why people couldn’t do both.

The pastor, Keenan Smith, like my rabbi, appealed for mutual aid. “It’s times like this, God, that people really see you,” he said. Being an essentially secular person, I probably took that slightly differently from the way he intended. In all the turmoil, what is really important comes into sharp relief: True feelings are shown; the agonies and the brightness of life are displayed.

Perhaps my neighbor Todd Lewis put it best. “There is a realignment of priorities,” he said.

Todd and his wife, Amanda, suffered little damage aside from the foot of water that flooded their garage. With a little time on his hands, Todd went door to door in our town and an adjoining neighborhood offering to rip out people’s drywall, while Amanda did people’s laundry and served neighbors dinner. When I told her that I was moved by their generosity, she responded, “We did nothing.”

I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of emails, phone calls and Twitter messages from relatives and friends asking how we are doing. It is almost embarrassing, but it sure feels good. I even heard from our house’s former owner, who wrote an emotional note to say he was sorry that the home he once loved had been damaged.

Neighbors have invited me into their homes, and shared details of their childhoods and other things I would never have known if not for the flood, conversations that have drawn us closer. Strangers have knocked on our door to ask if we need help, or food, or even an embrace. An elderly woman came by to hand me an envelope from our synagogue. There was an assistance check inside, and gift cards to replace towels and other household goods. “I may be back,” she said, smiling.

The search for housing, meanwhile, became a priority. I stopped at various buildings to see if anything was available. Most places wanted me to sign leases for six or seven months. Paola scanned Google for apartments near Texas Medical Center, realizing that doctors and patients regularly come and go. Smart move. We found a furnished two-bedroom apartment, and the management agreed to find a desk for Emilie to do her homework.

I know that a company-leased car is on the way for me. But we still needed to find a new one for Paola. We decided to lease, and keep more of the insurance money from her destroyed car. Right now I am still on a list to rent a car even temporarily, and dependent on a rickety old Volvo station wagon with a less-than-perfect muffler lent by a good friend. If it breaks down, we are in trouble.

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An upstairs office was returned to service even as crews began demolition work downstairs.CreditJake Price for The New York Times

I need cataract surgery, since the cataract in my right eye is worsening after my retina detachment surgery a few months ago. (Yes, it’s been a bad year!) Do I go with the expensive surgery that is not completely covered by insurance, or do I do it on the cheap? Time to plan for Emilie’s bat mitzvah. Move ahead, or do something modest? Our finances are up in the air.

And beyond those decisions is the uncertainty about how long it will take to get our house together, and replace things it took years to collect.

As a reporter who has worked in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa and made four trips above the Arctic Circle, I have had ample opportunities to meet people from all walks of life. The storm has given me another chance, perhaps the most intimate.

The other day we got a call that a tow company was coming for one of our cars. We assumed it was the Subaru parked in the driveway, which was blocking my company Malibu in the garage. But when Jon of Jon’s Wrecker Service came by, he had been contracted to pick up the wrong car. He thought he might be able to move the Subaru and get the Malibu out, and managed to start both cars. When the Malibu started, water began to gush out of the exhaust pipe. He couldn’t move the Subaru because of the electronic parking brake, which was immobilized by the flood damage.

Not only was his trip a waste of time, but now I also had a spill of water in the garage, with furniture in renewed danger of damage. Even though Jon had many more cars to pick up, he stayed to help me clean up, and he tried to work with me to get the damaged garage door working again. We began talking about our families, and how we had been affected by the storm. He is of Mexican descent, and his wife is from El Salvador. One of his children goes to a local school, and is missing classes. He told me about his career, beginning as an aviation mechanic, how his family loved to go to El Salvador every summer to swim at the beach.

“I’m getting a lot of work,” he said, but without a glimmer of glee. He was clearly tired. He said he wanted his children to go to college, something he now wishes he had done. When we parted, we said we hoped to see each other again.

One neighbor asked me if becoming a victim had made me a more empathetic interviewer. I have to think about that. But I do know that many people are in far more dire need than I am, and I feel for them.

While reporting in Crosby, I went to the high school, where employees from the Arkema plant were passing out checks from the company to needy families. I met two Mexican women who spoke broken English at best, so we spoke in Spanish. They had been forced to evacuate their homes because they were so close to the plant.

Both had families of five and had to wait in line for $100 checks, which weren’t going to take them very far. Araceli Reynosa, who works with her husband in a Mexican restaurant in Houston over 30 miles away, found the check insultingly inadequate considering her car was flooded and inoperable. “We have no car to go to work,” she said with a sigh.

The other woman, Leticia Sanchez, was no happier. “My house was totally flooded, and my animals — my dogs, my chickens, my goats — are all lost,” she said. With a sad but steady voice, she added, “They must be dead.”

All I could say was that my house was flooded, too.

“Sorry to hear that,” Ms. Sanchez said. I thanked her for her concern.